Weight of the World
by Feral Phoenix
Summary: She thought that once she got her own Exsphere, assuming the responsibility of her father's business would be easy. But just because you can pick up an axe doesn't necessarily mean you can swing it. Preseacentric oneshot.


Weight of the World

DISCLAIMER: Do not own Tales of Symphonia or Presea-chan, kthxbai. But the story is mine, so don't sue.

_If my skin was thicker, I wouldn't bleed. And even if I did, my family might be there to help me._

Presea bit her lip and leaned her forehead against the rough bark of the tree, sighing in frustration as she willed the tears not to come.

Even in the dark, sun-shielded heart of the forest, even after unzipping her black dress to the waist and shucking it from her shoulders to hang around her hips, even after tightly pulling her long hair back into double ponytails so it wouldn't stick to the nape of her neck, she was still covered in sweat and feeling like she was going to faint dead away any second now. She'd cast off her gloves hours ago, sodden with blood as they were, but wrapping her hands in bandages had proved futile as well. The blisters still sprouted, and burst, and soaked her hands. And now, even with the cloth, her hands were too slippery to keep hold of _that thing._

Presea glared balefully down at the axe embedded halfway into the tree's thick trunk. After two years of helping her daddy do the woodworking at their business, she'd somehow gotten the idea that once she could lift one of these stupid things, the rest would be easy. Somehow, in her naïve twelve-year-old mind, it had been as simple as getting an Exsphere so that she could boost her strength—once she could pick an axe up, she would be able to wield it with the ease of swinging a rag doll around.

As it turned out, _nothing _was that easy.

Presea's arms were killing her. The muscles ached as badly as if she'd stood and let someone big and heavy throw rocks at them all day. Her back felt twisted and abused, and _begged _her to lie down on something cold for the rest of the day. There wasn't a single space on her previously soft and delicate hands that wasn't covered by blood, blisters, or both. But she hadn't even managed to cut down a single tree today, and if she was going to take over her father's lumberjacking business, she would have to get _something _back home to work on.

She could pick up an axe now, yes. But having to hack away at a tree all day…

Well, apparently Exspheres weren't the cure-all they were supposed to be.

But then, Presea had never met a person with one equipped before, so to be fair, she couldn't really have known. Exspheres were supposed to bring out one's latent potential, making a human body much more resistant to wounds or diseases than before and increasing physical or magical power. Nowadays they were mostly used to control machinery, but every now and again you heard of somebody using them the old-fashioned way.

Presea wiped her bloody hands on her black skirts and looked down at herself, probing the jewel attached by means of a flowery-looking metal mount to her chest. It hadn't been long since the Exsphere broker had appeared in her home village of Ozette as though he'd been sent by the Goddess herself, looking for participants in an experiment that would take place in a research facility in another town. When Presea had heard that it involved Exspheres, she had volunteered—because there was no other way for her to support her family. Her daddy was sick, and just kept getting worse; it wasn't as though her baby sister Alicia could do anything to help; and to make matters worse, her mommy had died not long ago. Presea was the only one left to take care of things.

Having an Exsphere stuck to you took getting used to, especially when it meant that you also had to undergo tests at a laboratory on the other side of the forest every other week, but there were worse things in the world.

…Worse things like having to chop down trees, for instance.

Presea didn't have a watch with her, but she was willing to bet that the sun was already setting outside the forest. And even after she managed to cut this tree down, she would have to strip its branches, haul the trunk back to Ozette, and get it into the workshop. She would _then _need to separate it into the piles for the church, the village, the outside clientele, her family's own personal use, and the smaller pieces she would whittle into the little carvings she was already known for. The church's wood needed to be stripped of bark and smoothed down, the wood for their store would need shelving for a later date, and her own wood had to get chopped. Out of all of this, the only thing she'd been responsible for in the past was making carvings.

She'd been _so _proud of herself for it, too: Daddy's little girl, helping out with the family business at long last. Just a kid with some skill with a carving knife, although nobody had ever treated her like that.

Presea sighed and pushed her bangs out of her face, and wondered if she'd ever be that carefree again. She felt like she'd aged sixteen years over the past sixteen weeks, and looking back, she still couldn't quite believe the girl she'd been before her daddy had gotten sick.

She wanted things to go back to the way they'd been before…

_I want to be normal again. And if I can't have that, I at least want to be strong. I want to be strong so that Daddy and Alicia can count on me until things get better._

Grimacing, Presea wiped her hands on her dress again and pulled at her axe until it eased out of the tree's gaping wound. The least she could do was stop woolgathering and put this poor oak out of its misery already.

As she swung the weapon, she bit her lip and willed herself to ignore the way her arms screamed in protest and the new blood that squeezed out of her palms. In a series of swift strikes, she hacked through what still remained of the trunk.

She would've been self-conscious yelling "timber", so she stood on weak and shaky legs as she watched the big tree totter and crash into the undergrowth. As she did, she wondered if the tree hurt as much as she did, then dismissed her thoughts. There was still a lot of work to do before she could go home and rest.

Presea couldn't just be a normal twelve-year-old girl anymore—so she would have to become stronger. When her hands and her heart finally stopped bleeding, and her daddy was well again… then she would allow herself to feel the pain she pushed away.

With a sigh, Presea dragged her axe over to the fallen tree and got to work.

:owari:


End file.
